乔叟、中世纪文学及世界文学——玛丽恩·特纳教授访谈录, 张 炼 玛丽恩·特纳

I am pleased to share with you Zhang Lian’s interview with Marion Turner, J. R. R. Tolkien Professor of English Literature and Language at the University of Oxford and a Professorial Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall. Her books include Chaucer: A European Life (2019), The Wife of Bath: A Biography (2023), Chaucerian Conflict: Languages of Antagonism in Late Fourteenth-Century London (2007), Chaucer Here and Now (2023), and A Handbook of Middle English Studies (2013). Her books have won many prizes, including the British Academy Rose Mary Crawshay Prize, the Medieval Institute’s Otto Grundler Prize, and the English Association’s Beatrice White Prize, and have often been picked as “best books of the year,” including by The New Yorker, BBC History Magazine, The Times, The Sunday Times, The New Statesman, and The Times Literary Supplement. She curated the major exhibition “Chaucer Here and Now” at the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, which ran from December 8, 2023 to April 28, 2024.

Zhang Lian, Ph.D., is “One Hundred Talents Project” researcher at the School of International Studies, Zhejiang University. Her research fields are mainly medieval English literature and comparative literature. Email: zhanglian_hn@zju.edu.cn.

This interview appeared first as Zhang, Lian, and Marion Turner. “Chaucer, Medieval Literature, and World Literature: An Interview with Professor Marion Turner.”  Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Vol. 11. Ed. Tianhu Hao. Hangzhou: Zhejiang University Press, 2024: 191-202. We greatly appreciate the journal editors granting us permission to reproduce the interview.  

Zhang Lian: Professor Turner, thank you for accepting our invitation to talk with us on medieval literature and literary study in general. How did you become interested in medieval literature and devote decades to study it?

Marion Turner: I first read medieval literature in high school—in those days, everyone studying literature to an advanced level in the UK read Chaucer at high school. But it was at university that I really fell in love with medieval literature. I think it was for two reasons. First, it is just so varied. Medieval writers wrote in so many genres and forms, and were so experimental in the kinds of poetry they wrote. Later on, as the language became more standardized, particular poetic forms became dominant. But in the 14th century, the poetry of the Gawain-poet and of Chaucer were radically different from each other and equally fascinating. I loved the elegy Pearl, the tragic romance Troilus and Criseyde, and prose texts such as Mandeville’s Travels. Secondly, it is surprising. When I read Chaucer’s dream poem, The House of Fame, I was astonished to find that he was writing about writer’s block, about the limitations of the canon, about the power of reader response—things that many people would expect from modern texts, but that were in fact preoccupying medieval authors. When I read Hoccleve, I was moved and amazed to discover his poem about his own mental health. Medieval writing is so rich. And the more I studied, the more I fell in love with it.

Zhang: You speak many European languages. Did you learn these languages before or after you began your academic career? Was the mastering of multiple languages an impetus for your studies on medieval literature? Could you give us Chinese students and scholars any advice on learning European languages?

Turner: Well, first of all, I am really not a great linguist and I bet manypeople reading this are far more impressive than me in that area! I studied Latin to a high level at high school and have gone on reading and working on Latin texts and I also teach Old English. My French is okay and I have some Spanish and Italian—and in the past I studied some Arabic and some Japanese. Of course, romance languages are far easier for me than languages from other parts of the world—I found Japanese very hard! People from Anglophone countries are often bad linguists compared to many people from other parts of the world. Languages that I learnt as a child are much more embedded in my brain than languages that I picked up later. I do think that today we have a lot of tools with podcasts and other audio resources that are so helpful when trying to move between languages that sound very different, so I think that would be my advice—as well as formal study, watch TV programs and listen to audiobooks and podcasts to try to immerse yourself in the language you are studying.

Zhang: How would you see the role of multilingualism in medieval literature studies and world literature studies?

Turner: It is impossible to study medieval literature in a monolingual way. Chaucer was reading texts in French, Latin, and especially Italian, and he could not have written the poetry that he wrote without a deep knowledge of those languages. His poetry simply could not exist without the Tuscan poetry of Dante and Boccaccio. And all educated medieval men were multilingual—and educated women in England were at least bilingual (in French and English). So we need to think and read across borders to understand the world of medieval texts. Sticking with the example of Chaucer, he has become a global author in recent centuries—translated into multiple languages around the world, and influencing authors in many countries. It is so fascinating to see the different ways that varying cultures and traditions adapt medieval texts—the early 20th-century Chinese adaptations for instance!

Zhang: Yes, the Chinese adaptations are interesting. Chinese scholars were comparing Chaucer’s tales with Aesopian fables, Chinese yuyan (a writing style with a history of over two thousand years in China and often showing concern over political and social issues), and new Chinese fiction promoted by the social reformers in the early 20th century (related to literary, cultural and social modernization at the time). A multilingual study of medieval literature often involves with diverse literary genres and cultural values. Is your biography of Chaucer’s European life (Turner, 2019) a case in point?

Turner: To a certain extent, yes. In that biography, the contexts that I focus on most are European—both in terms of literary context and in terms of describing Chaucer’s own travels around Europe. It was encountering different literary forms that poets such as Boccaccio were using that enabled Chaucer to invent new forms in English. We can also see Chaucer engaging with other cultures: when he travelled to Navarre in 1366 (now a part of Spain, but then an independent country), he went to a country with vibrant Jewish and Muslim communities, and certainly encountered them. And when he translated his Treatise on the Astrolabe from Latin, he was aware that the Latin version was itself translated from an Arabic text by a Persian Jewish scholar. So he was aware of a culturally varied hinterland around his own work and life.

Zhang: Your handbook of Middle English studies (Turner, 2013) is organized around a set of key terms like “memory,” “race,” and “animality.” As these terms “demonstrate the engagement by literary scholars with current critical trends” (Turner, 2013: no page number), do they also promote inter-disciplinary study? Does it suggest that medieval studies is interdisciplinary?

Turner: Yes, I think that collection showcases interdisciplinarity in many ways. For instance, the whole third section is themed around “politics and places,” and includes chapters on areas such as city, class, nation, and church—all of which are profoundly rooted in history. Earlier in the book, there is a chapter on “material culture” that focuses on thinking about texts alongside the visual and history of art. There is a great chapter that engages closely with the environment (“Ecology”).

Zhang: Chinese scholars were also very interested in the social nature of Chaucer’s tales and imagined him as a sort of idealist criticizing the pilgrims and the backwardness of feudal churches and society. Is politics a major concern in your study of languages of antagonism in late 14th-century London (Turner, 2007)? How is your study different from Paul Strohm’s Social Chaucer (1989)?

Turner: I’m really interested in politics, and so was Chaucer—he writes a great deal about social and political formations and hierarchies, even though he famously avoids talking directly about contemporary politics. But he himself was embedded in civic and national politics—he was even himself a Member of Parliament. I don’t think he was an idealist, and it was very normal in his time to criticize the clergy! Paul Strohm’s Social Chaucer is undoubtedly one of the best books on Chaucer ever written, and we have worked closely together. Where we differ is that he ultimately sees the Canterbury Tales as a profoundly optimistic text about social possibility, whereas I emphasize more the struggles and conflicts within the pilgrim group. I think we’d both agree, though, that there was something politically radical and fascinating about the very idea of listening to such diverse voices in the Tales.

Zhang: Why did you say that Chaucer was “a player” (Turner, 2006: 13) in the medieval political world?

Turner: Chaucer did many jobs that were political—he was a Member of Parliament; he was a diplomat; he worked for the king and for great nobles. He had to negotiate competing interests, and had allies in different groups. So he had to be careful and subtle about not committing himself too radically to particular factions.

Zhang: Why is he more frank in his short poems, in which he refers directly to contemporary political figures and events? Does it have anything to do with the style of short poems? Many classical Chinese poems express the poets’ thoughts and feelings on current social affairs, and they were either concise or long and complicated.

Turner: Some of Chaucer’s short poems are written for a specific purpose—such as “The Complaint of Chaucer to His Purse,” in which he is asking for his allowances to be renewed by the new king. So it is a poem with a specific occasional purpose, unlike most of his poetry. But in other short poems, although he refers to contemporary events or people, he is doing so obliquely, so it still varies.

Zhang: Let’s turn to your new book, the biography of the Wife of Bath (Turner, 2023). How does the creation of the Wife of Bath show that literary forms and lived experience affect each other? Are receptions and adaptations in literary history an important way of building this figure up?

Turner: The Wife of Bath is built out of many literary sources, including texts by Jerome and Ovid and, most importantly, the Roman de la Rose. But Chaucer makes crucial changes to those sources, so that the Wife makes sense in his own historical moment. This was a time when, in England, women could work outside the home, inherit and keep their inheritance, earn money, marry many times. The first half of my book focuses on Alison of Bath in her own historical moment, exploring literary and historical medieval women, and the second half then turns to the reception of this character across time, moving through ballads, Shakespeare, Voltaire, James Joyce, and Zadie Smith, among many others, to explore her influence across time.

Zhang: How is this biography “experimental?”¹

Turner: It is a biography of someone who never existed, rather than a real person, and it is a biography not only of the character, but also of her afterlife—so it is a life that lasts over 600 years. And I interweave her fictional life with the lives of real medieval women. One inspiration is Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, which is also a kind of fictional biography spanning hundreds of years.

Zhang: “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” was introduced to China in the 1910s. Chinese scholars were promoting Chinese cultural reformation in order to modernize the old social and political systems. While the traditionalists were emphasizing the moral values of literature, scholars from the New Culture school called for a new literature developed from the Western mode. “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” was read as either a moral sermon highlighting Confucian ethics or “human literature” expressing concerns over issues of women and marriage. The reception and translation of this tale thus reflect the complicated Chinese cultural development in the socially transitional period of the early 20th century. Has the reading of this tale also been an interpretive act with political and social effects in English/Western history?

Turner: Yes, her prologue and tale have been interpreted in many different ways often according to the interests of the interpreters. For example, in the 18th century, her prologue was heavily censored by Alexander Pope, who removed many of the references to sex and the body, so that his version is only half the length of the original. In Victorian children’s versions, the tale was altered, so that the rape was usually replaced with a less shocking kiss, or insult. Interpreters have always been anxious about the radical aspects of what the Wife of Bath was saying: many of the earliest scribes wrote extensive comments on manuscripts, arguing with the Wife, and trying to persuade readers not to take her seriously.

Zhang: Peter G. Beidler’s book on the Wife of Bath (1996) presents five critical views on the literary figure, exemplifying critical approaches including new historicism, Marxism, psychoanalytical criticism, deconstructionist criticism, and feminist criticism. Your biography of the Wife of Bath deals with her life and afterlife. What does the difference suggest about the development of medieval studies in the past three decades?

Turner: Medieval studies is a rich field, and there is room for many different approaches. But recently there has been a “biographical turn,” and also a renewed interest in thinking about forms of selfhood—I’m thinking of the work of, for example, Holly Crocker on female subjectivity, or Sebastian Sobecki on the indexical self. Increasingly there is also a great deal of work on medievalism and reception.

Zhang: Medievalism focuses on the reception, interpretation, and re-creation of the European Middle Ages in post-medieval cultures. Medieval studies is usually distinguished from medievalism study, but the distinction between the two has begun to blur. Could you please say something about the future development of medieval studies and medievalism studies? Leslie J. Workman thought that “medievalism will adopt more of the attitude of historicism and that medieval studies will adopt more of the approach and procedure of medievalism” (Utz & Workman, 1998: 444). What do you think about this?

Turner: Many scholars and students are increasingly interested in medievalism and there is some excellent work being done in this field. Medievalism can be studied by non-medievalists, of course, but my interest is in work that can engage with the medieval itself and put that in conversation with later interpretations. I think we can better understand medievalist productions if we know what the artists, authors, or film-makers are choosing to leave out and how they are inflecting their work. And my primary interest remains the medieval itself, and I do think that studying medieval literature is usually very different from studying medievalism.

Zhang: The Bodleian’s new exhibition, “Chaucer Here and Now,” is curated by you. I see on the webpage of this exhibition a few introductory words: “Misogynist. Feminist. Conservative. Radical. Respectful. Irreverent. Monocultural. Multicultural. Imperial. Domestic. English. European. Catholic. Protestant.”² Do they tell the ways Chaucer has been viewed across time? How does this exhibition show that Chaucer is a dynamic figure remade in his life and afterlife?

Turner: Those words represent only some of the ways that Chaucer has been viewed across time. For instance, some people in the 16th century tried to imagine him as a proto-Protestant; Victorian editors linked him to the empire; 20th-century popularizers focused on him as irreverent and rude. There are so many different Chaucers across time. The exhibition looks at responses to Chaucer across six hundred years and more—from the earliest manuscript, produced around the time of Chaucer’s death in 1400, right up to the present day. It moves from folios to films, Caxton to the Cachoeira Tales, Anonymous to Zadie Smith. Dynamic is exactly the right word—we can trace so many different trends and changes in how Chaucer is viewed. Excitingly, today, Chaucer’s work is still very much alive and well, and the exhibition demonstrates how much is happening today: poems such as Telling Tales and A Double Sorrow; plays such as The Wife of Willesden; cartoons; television and film adaptations; translations into many languages. Students, writers, and artists alike remain fascinated and inspired by Chaucer’s poetry.

Zhang: So one theme of the exhibition is that literary canon changes with time?

Turner: I think there are two important points here. One, that as teachers who are introducing texts to students, it is really important not to be limited by an old-fashioned idea of the canon, which was overwhelmingly white and male. The canon has to change, which doesn’t necessarily mean throwing things out but rather bringing more things in. Two, our understanding of texts that have long been thought of as canonical changes across time.

Zhang: So that is why projects like global Chaucers, women in Chaucer, children in Chaucer, and orientalism in medieval studies keep coming out? How do these projects change the field of traditional medieval studies?

Turner: Medieval studies has changed enormously over recent decades, so work on sex and gender has long been central to what we do, particularly since the 1980s. Work on race and the global has also been increasingly influential over the past, say, twenty years or so in particular. It is really excitingto see the kind of work that is currently being done all over the world.

Zhang: Did you encounter anything interesting when you were collecting these different responses to Chaucer?

Turner: Well, yes—I think they are all absolutely fascinating! Some eras want to censor Chaucer; others to characterize him as bawdy and vulgar. Individual poems and novels demonstrate really specific and thoughtful responses to Chaucer right across time. Chaucer moves people in different ways, but his work remains extraordinarily powerful.

Zhang: I know that the Chinese translations of “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale” and “The Pardoner’s Tale” by Sun Yuxiu (1913a, 1913b, 1916) have been curated for this exhibition. In fact, I copied the translations from Zhejiang University Library. In addition to Chinese translations, what other languages do you include in the exhibition?

Turner: Other languages in the exhibition include Farsi, German, French, Hebrew, Korean, Esperanto, Latin, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese, and Ukrainian.

Zhang: Chinese translations of Chaucer and other Western literary works have influenced the 20th-century Chinese literary history. The themes, styles, and writing techniques of the Western works have promoted Chinese literary modernization. Thus translations of Chaucer into foreign languages form part of world literature. Does this indicate that Chaucer has become a global author in the past few centuries?

Turner: I suppose what I find interesting is that it works both ways. Chaucer’s works, in the 14th century, were world literature—born out of deep reading and encounters with texts from other cultures, written in other languages. Sometimes he was retelling stories familiar to people all over the world, transmitted across trading routes in complicated ways. Since the 18th century, his work has been translated into other languages, seeping back into diverse cultures, and gaining new life in different contexts. So I think he has always been a global author.

Zhang: One example is the frame narrative Chaucer adopts in the Canterbury Tales. The influences of Decameron, Arabian Nights, and Panchatantra from ancient India are obvious.

Turner: The tale collection is an important genre in many cultures, yes. It is interesting to think about the sources that Chaucer drew on, but also what he did that was distinctive. So, for example, I’m sure he knew the Decameron and found it a generative model, but what really matters is the crucial change that Chaucer made: while Boccaccio’s tale-tellers are all of the same, high social class, Chaucer’s are much more varied and socially diverse. By looking at sources, we can see how radical and surprising Chaucer’s choice was: he was suggesting that we should listen to all kinds of voices, not just the voices of the powerful. That was a radical socio-political idea, as well as a fascinating aesthetic choice.

Zhang: Thank you for your time and valuable insights.

Turner: My pleasure.

1. Marion Turner, Margaret Chowning, Virginia Trimble, and David A. Weintraub, “Interview:
   In Dialogue: Writing Women’s History,” Princeton University Press, 27 Mar. 2023, https://
   press.princeton.edu/ideas/in-dialogue-writing-womens-history, accessed 19 Feb. 2024. ↩︎
2. “Exhibition: Chaucer Here and Now,” Bodleian Libraries: Visit, https://visit.bodleian.ox.
   ac.uk/chaucer, accessed 2 Feb. 2024. ↩︎

Works Cited

Beidler, Peter G. Geoffrey Chaucer: The Wife of Bath. Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martins Press, 1996.

Strohm, Paul. Social Chaucer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1989.

Sun, Yuxiu. “European and American Novels.” Short Story Magazine 4.1 (1913a): 1-8. [孙毓修，1913a， 《欧美小说丛谈》, 《小说月报》第 4 卷第 1 期，第 1—8 页。]

—. “European and American Novels (Continued).” Short Story Magazine 4.2 (1913b): 9-14. [孙毓修 1913b， 《欧美小说丛谈（续）》，《小说月报》第 4 卷第2 期，第 9—14 页。]

—. European and American Novels. Shanghai: The Commercial Press, 1916. [孙毓修，1916， 《欧美小说丛谈》 ，上海：商务印书馆。]

Turner, Marion. Chaucer: A European Life. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2019.

—. Chaucerian Conflict: Languages of Antagonism in Late Fourteenth-Century London. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007.

—. A Handbook of Middle English Studies. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013.

—. “Politics and London Life.” A Concise Companion to Chaucer. Ed. Corinne Saunders. Malden: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2006. 13-33.

—. The Wife of Bath: A Biography. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2023.

Utz, Richard, and Leslie J. Workman. “Speaking of Medievalism: An Interview with Leslie J. Workman.” Medievalism in the Modern World: Essays in Honor of Leslie J. Workman. Ed. Richard Utz and Tom Shippey. Turnhout: Brepols, 1998. 433-449.